Collecting tuition for your child care center can be one of the least pleasant parts of your job. It puts tremendous financial pressure on you when parents pay late, and awkward conversations with families are unavoidable when payments get behind.
If you’re struggling with these challenges at your child care business, it’s time for a new tuition-collection process that brings more to your bottom line! The Procare fully integrated payment-processing platform was designed specifically for the child care industry. And when combined with Procare child care management software, you get a fully end-to-end solution to meet all your center management needs.
Let’s take a look at five challenges in collecting tuition and how Procare can help you solve them!
Challenge 1: Finding a Way to Make Getting Paid Easier
Today’s families expect a modern digital payment system. With payment-processing software, you can easily collect payments from parents in ways that are convenient and secure for both of you.
Younger parents in particular prefer paying their bills online — a recent study showed that HALF of millennials, the largest group of parents, have never even used a check!
Procare gives parents a choice in how they pay. Payments can be made automatically from their checking accounts or billed to their credit cards. And it’s easy to set up recurring plans.
With Procare’s fully integrated center management platform, billing and payments are automated. The billing software in the platform gives your center all the touchless payment options you need, making tuition collection a seamless experience for center providers.
Parents can access and make payments from a computer or through the Procare child care app on their phone!
Challenge 2: Syncing Tuition Collection With Your Child Care Management Software
An integrated payment-processing platform that’s designed for the child care industry can help you avoid the issues you may find in reconciling your balance sheet and month-end finances if you use third-party add-ons.
Using an accounting program that isn’t synced with your tuition, payroll and tax data — or if you’re doing bookkeeping on your own with pen and paper — often means that simple mistakes are harder to avoid and easier to miss!
And you could be paying too much by subscribing to several piecemeal services that don’t work together to give your program a single, complete financial picture — so you’re not saving time or money.
You need a software system that does all of the above … plus simplifying paying bills, tracking expenses as well as handling budgeting and overall financial reporting while making profitable business decisions based on revenue flow.
Challenge 3: Getting Paid in a Timely Manner
With Procare, funds are typically processed the following business day (subject to bank funding and processing approvals)! This means you get your money faster, ensuring you can cover ongoing costs.
And when parents make a payment online, it posts automatically to their ledger and is deposited into your account automatically.
Other payment processors can wait for a payment to clear before giving that money to a center – sometimes up to seven days, said Marissa Ryan, a payment-processing expert at Procare.
“Cash flow is so important to small businesses,” Marissa says. “And Procare is one of the only payment processors with that fast of a turnaround.”
Challenge 4: How to Offer Multiple Payment Options
Procare’s tuition-collection and payment-processing platform was built with parents in mind, allowing for convenient online and secure payments that ensure your center gets your tuition on time.
It’s incredibly unpleasant when the need arises to speak with parents about late tuition. And keeping up with making monthly payments by check is difficult for busy parents as well.
Procare gives parents a choice in how they pay. Payments can be made automatically from their checking accounts or billed to their credit cards. And it’s easy to set up recurring plans.
Parents need convenience and flexibility when they pay tuition, including self-serve and mobile options. With a comprehensive payment-processing platform, you can accept all forms of payments.
Parents can access and make payments from a computer or through the Procare child care mobile app on their phone!
Challenge 5: Creating a Clear Financial Picture
A payment-processing platform that integrates with your child care management solution can provide transparency for payment processing across all your sites with top-level and site-level reporting.
You get a real-time view of all center financials and receivables in the integrated dashboard showing tuition charges and balances tracking/calculations, multi-family billing options and fee transparency.
Families also can see their end-of-year statements, which they need for tax purposes. Other child care software providers don’t offer the feature of allowing parents to access their monthly or yearly statements – and it’s something that today’s parents want to do quickly and easily, when and where they want.
How Procare Can Help!
A full end-to-end solution that provides child care management software and payment processing in one place makes your business more efficient while improving your bottom line.
With Procare, you get a solution that helps you manage these top challenges to drive more to your bottom line and increase your profitability, including:
- Enabling families to pay via the Procare child care mobile app
- Automated invoicing
- Ledger posting
- Quicker funding
- Reduced administrative payroll hours processing tuition payments
Want to know how much time and money you could save by using Procare’s secure and effortless child care payment processing? Enter some details into this online calculator to learn about your potential savings of using automation!